The difficulty of Normal Content in this game needs to increase.

[Rueby]

Clearing an ultimate or getting the mentor certification has nothing to do with whether someone can remember every last detail of the 200+ (normal) duties available via Duty Finder. Or inoculate them from ever making a mistake again. Or prevent their cat from wandering over the keyboard at the wrong time. Etc. Etc.

It's naive to put these people on a pedestal just because they dedicated alot of time to one piece of content, such a toxic way of looking at it too because it paints the picture with the expectations that these people are god gamers who must make no mistakes but the fact is that they make mistakes and learn...

[Lilapop]

Clearing an ultimate or getting the mentor certification has nothing to do with whether someone can remember every last detail of the 200+ (normal) duties available via Duty Finder. Or inoculate them from ever making a mistake again. Or prevent their cat from wandering over the keyboard at the wrong time. Etc. Etc.

Hey! As a cat owner, I'll have you know my cat is better at this game than me.

[TaleraRistain]

Yes, but only because the total number of players would get smaller. For example, if you just drive out everyone who can't clear savage, you'll have an exceptionally skilled pool of players.

Being able to do the dance for a single fight that you spend countless hours on until you can do it in your sleep doesn't mean those players are anything close to good in normal content. I often see Legend titles fall into the hole or die to the AoEs around the hole on the final boss of the latest MSQ dungeon. Or don't get close enough to the wall on the second boss. They also tend to greed a *lot* more and end up making stupid mistakes. And that's perfectly okay, because people who can clear Savage aren't some sort of god gamer that never messes up. We all mess up. Wipes sometimes happen. We pick ourselves up and try again.

[BigCheez]

I think the oversimplification of the game is a much bigger problem than people unsyncing content.

Yes, the casual content was always easy. But in the past, playing your job and playing your role were both slightly more complex. Now that the jobs are incredibly similar & simplistic and role responsibility has been degraded to the point that you barely need a tank or healer and enmity isn't an issue in any way, you don't really need to pay attention. You can just AFK through most normal mode content.

It shouldn't be a surprise that people end up being terrible at the game when the game does everything it can to teach them that they don't need to pay attention and their performance doesn't matter.

[Azurarok]

I wouldn't mind normal content being around EW levels if jobs had more room to challenge ourselves with instead. They've shifted so much of the difficulty of the game to content design and away from job design, there's just no sensible way to make doing simpler content more enjoyable now.

[BigCheez]

I wouldn't mind normal content being around EW levels if jobs had more room to challenge ourselves with instead. They've shifted so much of the difficulty of the game to content design and away from job design, there's just no sensible way to make doing simpler content more enjoyable now.

Basically, this. But with the caveat that I strongly prefer the smaller boss hitboxes to the 2/3 arena size ones that were used in Endwalker. Narrowly dodging AOEs to keep uptime is one of the most fun parts of combat and that doesn't exist when the entire fight happens inside of the boss hitbox. That and having the boss re-centre before and after every mechanic degrades the tank role by making positioning irrelevant.

I'd be fine with Endwalker mechanics if we had more job and role complexity plus the smaller hitboxes that we have in ARR through Sb and Dt.

[CidHeiral]

I wouldn't mind normal content being around EW levels if jobs had more room to challenge ourselves with instead.

One doesn't have to be braindead for the other to be engaging and fun. Fight design and jobs can both be the latter.

[FemmeFatale]

Yeah because increasing the difficulty and pushing ultimates/chaotic raids has done wonders for what's left of the playerbase.

[BigCheez]

Yeah because increasing the difficulty and pushing ultimates/chaotic raids has done wonders for what's left of the playerbase.

The difficulty of casual content hasn't increased.

[FemmeFatale]

The difficulty of casual content hasn't increased.

Good, I hope it doesn't either.